I hope you’ve enjoyed searching with Ecosia over the past two weeks, and maybe clocked up some trees on your tree counter already!

This week, I’m going to ask you to stand up, and plant something for real. But don’t worry, even if you’re not a natural gardener, I promise it’ll be easy and will make you feel great.

Why blue flowers? Well to start with, flowers have positive and lasting effects on humans, improving mood, social connections, and reducing stress. They trigger feelings of happiness and contentment, and may even improve memory… but the colour blue (or purple) is chosen for our pollinator friends, the bees.

Lavender is a great choice. It’s low maintenance, flowers all year round, smells lovely, has a calming effect on people, and bees love it! But a variety of flowers is ideal.

What bees see

Bees see the world a little differently to us. That’s because the photoreceptors in their eyes are green, blue, and ultraviolet (ours are red, green and blue). So although they can’t see red, they can see glorious ultraviolet patterns on many flowers which aren’t visible to us, which help them find nectar. Pansies and sunflowers are some of these flowers.

Bees can also see yellow and white, but purple and blue flowers are the easiest for them to spot. Their two sets of eyes give them excellent peripheral vision and depth perception. They can see individual flowers whilst travelling at speed, and use polarized light patterns to navigate.

Bees’ favourite flowers include:

• Flowering herbs: lavender, thyme, rosemary, catmint, borage, sage, oregano
• Tubular flowers: snapdragons, honeysuckle, rhodos, bluebells
• Wildflowers: clover, daisies, buttercups, dandelions, cornflowers, forget-me-not, heather etc.
• Others: alyssum, asters, delphiniums, primroses, sunflowers
• Flowering trees i.e. tea-tree, apple, citrus, plums, berries etc etc…

Bees and our food

Most of us know that bees are pretty important in modern agriculture. Their excellent vision, foraging ability and furry bodies make them highly efficient pollinators. They also produce honey, and tolerate their hives being transported to pollinate different crops. Nearly a third of the food we eat is produced using honeybees(!) and it’s all the good stuff – the fruits, vegies and nuts.

Of course this is a modern phenomenon. In the small, diverse farms of the past, there were enough crop variety and wildflowers to sustain native pollinators. There are over 25,000 known species of bee worldwide, and over 1500 in Australia. Other important pollinators include: butterflies, wasps, ants, flies, midges, mosquitoes, moths and beetles! These insects are often considered pests, but in fact they are an integral part of plant reproduction.

In recent decades, farming has become ever more “efficient”, with fewer farmers growing larger and larger single-crop monocultures. As they lack native pollinators, these crops depend on beehives being brought in at the right time. To get an idea of the scale this can reach, it takes almost the entire population of kept bees in the USA to pollinate the California almond crop each year.

Unfortunately, monocultures also deplete soil nutrients and beneficial insects, and have poor resistance to pests and diseases. This means they also depend on chemical fertiliser, and chemical pesticides (insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides). And these are toxic to bees.

The pollinators are in trouble

You probably know that bees are in trouble. Around 2005, beekeepers started to sound the alarm that their colonies were collapsing. In the following years bees dropped dead in droves, and whole hives ‘disappeared’ presumably due to impaired navigation. Beekeepers are still struggling to maintain adequate numbers to sustain their operations, and meet the demands of the growing agricultural sector.

Farmers know to spray pesticides at alternate times to when they need pollination. Unfortunately, bees can still be exposed to chemicals from neighbouring farms, and some chemicals may persist longer than we expect. Some newer pesticides (neonicotinoids) are used to treat seeds, so they pervade the plant throughout its life, and are present in the environment for several years after use. The same qualities that make honeybees experts at foraging and pollination, mean they are also excellent at picking up substances from the environment. They can be the sentinels that show up environmental problems. Investigating mass hive deaths, researchers in the US detected up to 50 different pesticides present in a single bee.

Moving bees around to pollinate crops also increases their exposure to varroa mites (everywhere except Australia… for now) and viruses, which mites can transmit. Bees have some resistance to these factors in isolation, but all three operating together with high pesticide exposures are taking their toll on bees and beekeepers.

Our current use of monoculture farms, pesticides, and exclusive honeybee pollination make us vulnerable to the effects of honeybee pests and diseases, and endangers a large chunk of our global food supply.

Bees and the city

The odds are you probably live in a town or city. And here you can also make a difference. Around 10 years ago, UK bee researchers noted that although bee colonies were collapsing left, right, and centre; the bees in London seemed to be doing just fine. Strange as it may seem, cities have become safe havens for bees; probably due to the species diversity in parks and home gardens, and relatively low use of pesticides.

Other easy ways we can help

• Mow your lawn a bit less. Allow some wildflowers to grow in it. Bees love clover, daisies, buttercups, dandelions… and it’s less work for you!
• Plant perennials, or flowers that grow at different times, so there’s always something for bees and other pollinator insects.
• If you’re short on time, just buy a pot of lavender, or sprinkle some pollinator-friendly seed mix on the ground.
• If you don’t have any outdoor space you could join a community garden, or try guerilla gardening. Guerilla gardeners are known for planting sunflowers on traffic islands and neglected nature strips, but anything goes.
• Build or buy a bee-hotel for native bees, most of which are solitary.
• Involve your kids. It’s a wholesome activity that will get them outside and interested in nature.
• Avoid all pesticides – use netting and companion planting to protect your fruit or vegies from ‘pest’ insects, and eggshells or sand for slugs. If you must use pesticide, use organics.
• Buy local honey to support your local beekeepers!
• Shop at your local farmers market to support small, diverse farms and organic produce.

More information…

There is a lot of great information out there, but I highly recommend watching The Pollinators (2019) – an excellent documentary about bees and beekeepers in America. You can stream it on Amazon Prime, GooglePlay etc, and the trailer is below.

Keep the Hives Alive (2017) is a short doco you can watch for free on YouTube.

So, happy planting! May your garden, balcony or local traffic island be full of flowers, bees, and butterflies. And may you be full of joy every time you see them.